Sunny and Swarmy in Azure

While it continues to be surprisingly sunny here in Seattle, our continued contribution and integration with the awesome updates from the Docker community should not be surprising. Today, I am excited to announce that we are joining Docker, Inc. in announcing the beta releases of Docker Machine and Docker Swarm on Azure and Docker Machine support on Hyper-V. We also plan to directly support Docker Compose in the Azure provisioning pipeline, using our Docker Azure extension. Last October, we promised to continue to support and contribute to the Docker community and today is one more step. You can find more details on the support for Docker Machine on Windows Server Hyper-V in Ross’s blog here. The Hyper-V support simplifies going “zero to Docker” by creating VMs with the Docker engine installed and ready to go. Let me explain a bit more about what we have supported in Azure.

Docker Machine

Docker Machine offers one portable command that works uniformly across a plethora of different infrastructures. We contributed driver capabilities in Azure to enable fast and agile deployment of Docker hosts using Docker Machine on Azure Virtual Machines, with Azure being one of the earliest contributors to Machine. There are several advantages to using Docker Machine, including the ability to automate the creation of your Docker VM hosts on any compatible OS and across many infrastructure options. With today’s announcement, you can automate Docker host creation on Azure using the Docker Machine client on Linux or Windows. Additionally, Docker Machine provides you the ability to manage and configure your hosts from a single remote client. You no longer have to connect to each host separately to perform basic monitoring and management tasks, giving you the flexibility and efficiencies of centralized devops management. For step-by-step instructions for creating Docker hosts using Azure VMs, please visit our Docker Machine on Azure Documentation.

Docker Swarm

An additional exciting announcement today, Docker Swarm enables you to deploy your container-based applications and workloads using a native Docker clustering and scheduling capability. Like Docker Machine, developers can choose their infrastructure, including Azure Virtual Machines, and scale as required for their dev, test, or production environments. You can use your normal Docker CLI to deploy and let Swarm handle the scheduling across the hosts. To get started with Swarm on Azure, install the beta client: Installing Docker Swarm. For step-by-step instructions to manage your Docker hosts with Docker Swarm on Azure VMs, please see our Docker Swarm on Azure User Guide.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose is really cool simplification to modeling Docker multi-container solutions by using a declarative YAML file. This single file will be able to take a developer-modeled application across any environment and generate a consistent deployment, offering even more agility to applications across infrastructure. In Azure, we are working to expand our current Docker extension to support passing of the YAML configuration directly through our REST APIs, CLI, or portal. This will make the simple even simpler, so you can just drop your YAML file details into the Azure portal and we take care of the rest. Stay tuned for more details on this… If you’d like to contribute to our working Pull Request, check it out here. Hope this helped!! Please, send us your thoughts or feedback. See ya around, Corey